Plenty of Affordable Housing on Pandora

by Jim Washburn

Slough Off Your Earthly Form Today!

We saw Avatar on Christmas. We loved it. We saw Avatar a second time. We loved it even more. We took my wife’s dad. He was an impressionable 15 years old when The Wizard of Oz came out 1939. He’s 85 now, and liked Avatar better.

The movies have similarities. Both were very expensive to make due to their unparalleled special effects. Both took you to richly imagined other worlds. Both messed with your heads. To this day I can not pass an apple orchard without cringing, while I can always count on my twitchy Lollipop Guild imitation to creep out my wife. And everyone is terrified of those flying monkeys. Forget drone bombs. If we really wanted to muss terrorists’ hair, we’d do it with flying monkeys.

Avatar’s James Cameron bears comparison to Stanley Kubrick, who, like Cameron, helped devise whole new technologies to create the visions they saw. Kubrick cocooned lightweight Arriflex cameras to give them the mobility to move among his actors without their whirr ruining the live sound; he reinvented special effects for 2001. He helped in the development of low-light cameras so his period piece Barry Lyndon could have scenes lit solely by candlelight. All common practices now, but unheard of until Kubrick created them.

I used to worship the guy in my teens. Being older and weathered now, I find most of Kubrick’s films lacking. He made a bold experiment, attempting to tell stories in a filmic language without the trappings of the stage. Bravo, but in the process he largely tossed out the human element. Actors became just one more surface for him to bounce light off of. (Exceptions? Sure, but you had to be as good as James Mason to be one.) That’s why Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket was a detached, leaden tone poem about war, while Oliver Stone’s less artful Platoon punched you in the stomach until you understood war.

But bless Kubrick: he had his moments. In 1968, when 2001 was in its debut run at Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome, my favorite hippie era band, Spirit, went to see it. In the closing movement, when human consciousness and the universe merge in a grand lightshow, guitarist Randy California, on acid of course, flung himself against the screen. You would have too, because that was your story up there. After seeing 2001, Federico Fellini wrote to Kubrick, “You make me dream with my eyes open!”

That’s Avatar in a nutshell. It’s about as good a dream as you can have without involving 72 virgins. You will feel a lot like you’re walking on another planet, flying on that other planet, continually being pricked by the wonder of it, because it’s not just any crappy planet among the billions but one so deeply and richly imagined that you realize it’s the work of humans doing a pretty good job of playing god. Avatar is a powerful work of creation and love, up there in its way with Pet Sounds or Band of Gypsys, or with the Tolkien Trilogy (Don’t get me started on Peter Jackson’s horrid ego-infused rendition) in creating a place that is at once so fanciful and true. See the thing before all those McDonald’s ads and other commercial tie-ins blind you to its wonders.

The story? It’s nothing that special or new. Stereotypes abound and you can see where perhaps parts were borrowed from the sources critics have cited, and also possibly from Frank Miller’s Ronin, and most certainly Cameron’s own earlier films. The script? It got the job done, but Cameron could have trusted the camera to tell more of the tale. So? Most artists who don’t borrow also don’t have much to give. And sometimes perfection isn’t perfect. Rather, it is the flaws that make them human-scaled and endearing. Some of Pet Sounds’ lyrics are hokey; the incredibly live music of Band of Gypsys wasn’t quite up to the James Brown standard of tightness, most notably Buddy Miles who, when he got carried away, sounded more like he was splashing in a tub than playing a drum set. Yet I can still listen to that album daily and wonder at it anew.

I don’t know that I’ll be watching Avatar daily 40 years from now, not unless they have great home 3D systems then, and not unless I finally strike it rich at age 94 so I can afford one. As it stands now, it may be one of the few movies you truly need to see on a big screen to experience. Every movie theater owner in this planet world should be sending their thanks Cameron’s way, because he’s made them necessary again. He’s also deserving of a Special Oscar for “Most Colorful Cinematic World Ever Imagined by a Heterosexual.”

Having seen it in IMAX 3D and normal screen-sized 3D, I’d recommend the latter format. It’s a slightly more immersive experience on the huge IMAX screen, but on the smaller screen it seems more vivid and real, and it’s easier to follow the action. Unlike most 3D flicks, arrows, diapers, and bowling balls don’t go flying past your head every 18 seconds. Most of the time the effect is subtle but profound, adding a tactile depth to this strange world.

Back to Oz for a minute: Did you know that E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, who co-write “Over the Rainbow” with Harold Arlen, was a remarkable leftie, who’d been a pacifist/socialist draft-dodger in WWI; who’d written the Depression-era classic “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”; and whose Oscar wasn’t enough to keep him from being blacklisted in 1940s’ Hollywood? Didja know that in one of L. Frank Baum’s later adventures, Dorothy’s Uncle Henry and Auntie Em have to take up residence in Oz because they can’t keep up with the mortgage on their home on Earth?

There are evidently no mortgages on Pandora. Everyone lives tribally, and sleeps in hammocks in trees. They are pretty much your everyday 10-foot, blue noble savages, all remarkably limber and buff, a result of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. I don’t know what they do for dentists, but they otherwise seem provided for by living at-one with nature.

There there’s us, the humans who’ve traveled six light years to plunder the Pandorans’ mineral wealth because we’ve entirely tapped out our no-longer green planet. It’s the usual story, the one previously told with the bones of Native Americans, and today still in the South American rain forests and the oil fields of Nigeria: If other humans come along with a “better” idea of what to do with your land, justice, property rights, decency, and what we comically like to refer to as our “humanity” go right out the broken window, and those with the power take what they want.

One of the complaints I’ve read about Avatar is that it’s basically another in a long, long line of “bwana movies” —including Tarzan, Dances With Wolves, The Magnificent Seven, The Last Samurai, and so on—where it’s always some white guy who comes to the rescue of the bedraggled people of color.

But the hero this time, Jake Sully, is made into a creature of mixed human and Na’vi DNA, making him no more white than Obama. There is also the fact that nearly every son of a bitch in the movie is a white guy, a fact not unremarked upon by conservative commentators, who are affixing a galactic version of the “blame America first” label slap on anyone who dares notice, for example, that America is solely responsible for an unjust, unprovoked war on Iraq in which hundreds of thousands have needlessly died.

There is also this: Jake Sully isn’t just the Na’vi’s savior; he is also their Judas. When their ancestral home is incinerated by the human forces anxious for the “unobtanium” located under their treehouse, it’s done with the intel Jake has provided them. Maybe he saves the Na’vi in the end, but the real story is how they save his soul.

Much as 2001 was a brief history of the opposable thumb and its advantages and ultimate limitations on human development, Avatar is also a film about “man the toolmaker” and how the end-game of that is to play god. Its humans climb into huge robotic machines that respond to their slightest movement. They project their consciousness into manufactured Na’vi bodies. The Na’vi, meanwhile, use their ponytail tendrils to project their consciousness into huge flying creatures. Then there’s Cameron, using $300 million, thousands of technicians and Christ knows how many banks of computers to plug us into an entire world.

Reviewers who’ve referred to Avatar as “a game-changer” mainly seem to be addressing its technical achievements and how it has raised the bar for movie spectacles. I’m hopeful it may be another kind of game-changer, one that nudges human consciousness along a little bit, as the Beatles’ music did and continues to do. For well over a century now, human technological progress has outstripped our moral capacity to shape the outcome of that progress. Avatar’s remarkable technology-created vision of a non-technological but otherwise more advanced world may help redress that. Not a bad way to start a new year.

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